Faces of a divided island

Chat with us in Facebook Messenger. Find out what's happening in the world as it unfolds.

Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic (CNN)The anti-immigrant rhetoric on the radio, in shops and in the streets is familiar:

The influx from our poorer neighbor is overwhelming. They steal jobs. They are dangerous. They take advantage of our laws.

So is the counterweight:

They are seeking better lives. They do the labor-intensive jobs locals won't. They contribute to the economy.

This isn't about building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border or deporting undocumented Central American immigrants. It's an argument taking place 700 miles off the coast of Miami on the island of Hispaniola, home to the Dominican Republic and Haiti -- two nations divided by history as much as a border.

Read More

It's an uneasy coexistence for countries whose intertwined histories of colonization, conquest and racism over the centuries have left deep wounds.

In recent years, controversial court rulings and laws have renewed tensions in the Dominican Republic.

Hundreds of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent were stripped of their citizenship and forced to prove they were born here. Hundreds of thousands more who are undocumented immigrants have been forced to register with the government.

In a political fight with arguments similar to the debate in the United States, the immigration hard-liners won. Last year I traveled across the Dominican Republic and Haiti to see the fallout from that battle. Among the people I met: A soccer player who left the Dominican national team because she couldn't prove her nationality, a law student fighting for Haitians' rights, and a woman who saw her town divided along racial lines.

Here are their stories amid scenes of life on the island.

Raquel Aristilde de Valdez, a Dominican of Haitian descent, is a business owner in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.

Foreigner in her own country

Standing in front of her flower shop in Santo Domingo's Pequeño Haiti, or Little Haiti neighborhood, Raquel Aristilde de Valdez introduces herself as Haitian, though she was born here, in the Dominican capital.

She belongs to a slice of the Dominican population -- about 2.5% of 10.4 million -- born in the country with at least one immigrant parent.

I ask her how she sees herself, and she says "Dominico-Haitian. Fifty-fifty."

There is pride evident as she explains how easily she shifts between Dominican Spanish and Haitian Creole, fluent in the languages and cultures of the two countries.

To her, the only things that make her "Dominican" are her birth certificate and her national ID card, or cedula.

For a time, even those things were stripped from her, when a lawsuit accusing the government of discriminating against people like Raquel backfired.

In the suit, another Dominican-born woman of Haitian descent alleged that authorities denied her a cedula because her parents were immigrants.

For decades, the Dominican Republic's Constitution had bestowed citizenship on anyone born on Dominican soil, just like in the United States. That ended in 2010, when the Constitution was rewritten to exclude children of undocumented immigrants.

The lawsuit sought to validate the citizenship of those born to immigrant parents before 2010. Instead, the country's highest court ruled in 2013 that all residents born to immigrant parents dating back more than 80 years were not entitled to citizenship.

In a flash, approximately 210,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent, including Raquel, were made stateless.

Human rights groups sounded the alarm over the population of noncitizens that was so suddenly created.

International pressure mounted, including from the country's Caribbean neighbors, and the Dominican government provided a "fix": a law creating a path to restore citizenship.

"No one born in the Dominican Republic will be deported, and no one who holds or is entitled to legal Dominican nationality will be deprived of it," Dominican Ambassador to the United States Jose Tomas Perez wrote in an op-ed in July.

The ambassador is partly correct. The mass deportations that many feared have not come to pass. But fear may have been enough. Heightened racial tensions and the idea of deportations caused tens of thousands of Haitian immigrants and Dominicans of Haitian descent to leave on their own. It reminded me of the anti-illegal immigration laws some U.S. states have passed, and the talk of "self-deportations" in the 2012 presidential election.

Raquel was among the fortunate who didn't have to fear for long.

Her birth in Santo Domingo had been recorded in the civil registry at the time. With proof of her Dominican birth, she quickly reclaimed her citizenship under the new law.

Dominicans who bristle at accusations of xenophobia point to this legal remedy.

But less than a third of the estimated 210,000 left stateless successfully reclaimed their citizenship.

Figures provided by the Dominican government last year show about 64,000 people benefited from the law. About 70% of those who qualified to have their citizenship restored didn't or weren't able to seek a legal remedy.

The more common situation, I learned through dozens of interviews, is that children of immigrants are not recorded in the civil registry at birth.

The reasons are many -- fear of deportation if the parents are undocumented, births outside of hospitals, or language barriers.

"For me it was easy," Raquel says, "but others had more complications."

An immigration issue cost Cherlina Castillo Pierre her spot on the Dominican national women's soccer team.

Born to play soccer

Cherlina Castillo Pierre was raised in Baraguana, one of the Dominican Republic's many bateyes -- slums that sprang up during the 20th century as Haitians were brought in to work the sugar cane fields.

Baraguana is in the northern Dominican town of Imbert, close enough to the coast to feel the full force of the sun but not the salty breeze.

Cherlina grew up playing soccer in the batey. "I learned by playing with the boys," she says. "I was the only girl playing."

She started playing competitively at age 12, and three years later was selected to the Dominican national women's under-17 team.

Her future looked bright. Soccer would open doors for Cherlina, who was born in the Dominican Republic, the child of undocumented Haitian immigrants.

She played halfback for the national team because, she says, her Haitian roots made her stronger than her teammates.

Her toughness and attitude surely was reflected on the field; records show that Cherlina played in five games representing the Dominican Republic, drawing a red card in one match and a yellow card in another.

The dream began unraveling when she had to renew her Dominican passport to travel with the team. She had been issued a passport as a child, but now that she was no longer a minor, she needed a cedula to renew it. Although this was before the 2013 court ruling, it was not uncommon for authorities to demand proof of a person's birthplace before issuing a cedula -- let alone a passport. Because her birth had not been recorded in the civil registry, she faced an uphill climb, and had to forfeit her dream.

Children play soccer in a dirt lot in Ouanaminthe, Haiti.

She wore the Dominican jersey on her back, but the country it represented considered her a foreigner.

It confounded her. She is proud of her Haitian heritage but considers herself a proud Dominican as well.

"If I had a chance to play for the national team again, I would," Cherlina says. "But I didn't get my hopes up because I know I don't have a cedula, and with no cedula I won't be able to play anywhere."

An official at Fedefutbol, the Dominican Republic's governing body for soccer, told me that Cherlina's name didn't ring a bell and that the Dominican team would never have a Haitian on it.

"She's Dominican," I explained.

I sent the federation the records of Cherlina's matches and asked for more details, but got no response.

Cherlina now works at a restaurant in Imbert and, since 2013, has been among the stateless.

Because her birth was not recorded in the civil registry, the law to "fix" her status would require multiple identification documents, notarized testimonies of Dominicans to vouch for her birthplace, and a two-year wait to apply for citizenship.

Her father passed away, Cherlina says, and she has no idea where he kept the documents that may prove her identity and place of birth to the satisfaction of Dominican authorities.

Bernard Teillon is an undocumented Haitian immigrant who has lived in the Dominican Republic for decades.

A wheelbarrow and a dream

Bernard Teillon says he has lived in the Dominican Republic for 50 years.

And he wants to go back to his native Haiti, as soon as he can afford it.

A long-time laborer in the fields -- sowing and harvesting crops -- Bernard would qualify for legal work status under a recent Dominican law to address the population of undocumented immigrants.

The National Regularization Plan was the government's answer to the hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants already living in the Dominican Republic, some for decades.

A 2012 census of migrants found that about 460,000 Haitian immigrants live in the Dominican Republic. More than half, about 61%, were undocumented.

Prove your identity and provide evidence of how long you've been in the country, your ties to Dominican society, and your work and socioeconomic condition.

It's an invitation to "come out of the shadows," to borrow a phrase from the U.S. immigration debate.

These apparently simple requirements, however, proved for many to be a bureaucratic nightmare, a hell brimming with red tape.

Bernard, for instance, struggled to get a copy of his Haitian passport or birth certificate to prove his identity. He said he couldn't afford the time or money to put together the required paperwork.

It is not impossible to get legal status without a birth certificate or passport. Some 20,300 undocumented immigrants registered without them, according to the Dominican Interior Ministry, but the alternate routes are not easy. It might require Bernard getting seven sworn statements from Dominicans who would attest to his life in the country.

Bernard found it too daunting. His neighbors are mostly Haitian. What Dominicans would vouch for him? Do the Dominicans he has worked for or interacted with remember him or know him well enough to write a testimony on his behalf? The immigration controversy is red hot, so many Dominicans might not want to put their name as a reference for an undocumented immigrant.

Bernard rents a small room in the Hato Mayor neighborhood of Santiago, the country's second-largest city. Immigration raids have snared neighboring tenants, and he knows it could happen to him.

"I confide much in God, so I have confidence I will be all right and that nothing bad will happen to me," Bernard says.

Timeline: A brief history of Hispaniola

Still, he wants to leave.

"Not so much out of fear, but out of respect and dignity," he says. "To see so many of my countrymen fighting so hard to get a simple identification card, and they still face so much discrimination in this country. All this has taken me to a place of consciousness to go back to my country."

He wants to depart the Dominican Republic on his own terms.

But he says he is too poor; even saving money to pay for transportation to the border is out of reach.

Next to his room, a wheelbarrow is locked to a post with a chain. It's an old wheelbarrow, and it is the one asset Bernard owns that helps him earn money doing small jobs.

"Haiti is also hard," he says, recalling why he left decades ago. Bernard remembers it as a place of permanent persecution during the rule of strongman Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier.

Though times have changed in Haiti, it made me wonder about the effects of trying to solve a country's immigration problem without talking to the nation of origin. Can taking a unilateral, hard-line stance against Haitians work if there is no future in Haiti either?

Bernard says his health is failing. The stress makes him feel that his age has caught up to him.

"I will go to Haiti," he says. "My future is uncertain."

Mirlande Saint Jean waits to get her national ID card after sleeping in line on the sidewalk.

Long lines -- and longer waits

The sun was past its highest point in the sky in Puerto Plata, the historic port city on the Dominican Republic's northern coast, when I met Mirlande Saint Jean. She was outside the city's main government office, waiting in line to try to get her immigration status "regularized."

She had been waiting since before the sun came up -- actually, since before the sun went down the day before.

But Mirlande says she really has been waiting for much longer.

"The thing is that every time I come to get my cedula, something happens," she says. The authorities tell her she is missing this document, or that document.

This is her fourth trip to city hall.

"I spent the night outside, sleeping on the street. Everyone slept on the street," she said.

Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Mirlande says the Dominican Republic has been home for 20 years.

In the city of Santiago, the line of immigrants waiting at city hall stretches for blocks.

There was no dire situation that pulled her to emigrate, she just felt too closed-in in Haiti. She wanted to be somewhere with more possibilities. She settled in Puerto Plata, working first in a restaurant and now at a villa.

Politically, she is not opposed to the government's immigration controls. Every country needs to have its residents documented properly, she says.

"For me, this is better, so that I can live my life in peace," she says. "But everything they ask for is too much."

Technically, the process doesn't cost money, but Mirlande and others have had to hire attorneys to help sort through the law.

"All I want is to live in peace," she says. "All I want is to be left alone like I leave others alone."

'I'm still struggling'

The scene in Puerto Plata is repeated in other cities around the Dominican Republic. At dawn the next morning in Santiago, a line of migrants stretches around the block containing city hall and continues across the street along a park.

"I came here looking for a better life, a life I couldn't find in Haiti," says one man who didn't give his name. He says that better life never materialized.

He has a job as a doorman, he says, but "I'm still struggling. My job doesn't pay well."

The man, a native of Gonaives, Haiti, doesn't hold much hope that his life will improve with legal status, but after 14 years in the Dominican Republic, it's home now.

Surprisingly, many of the immigrants I meet in line aren't opposed to the idea of registering the undocumented. It's only fair, they said, that a nation should know who is living within its borders. But this isn't the way to do it. The laws, they say, need to be carried out fairly.

It left me wondering: How can a nation tackle the issue of illegal immigration -- by asking migrants to trust the government's proposals -- when the same government has not addressed its own legacy of racism? Prejudice on Hispaniola dates back to the first colonies and intensified as Dominican leaders portrayed Haitians as inferior to those with Spanish and indigenous roots. How can immigrants give the government the benefit of the doubt that there are no ulterior, xenophobic motives behind the new policies, when they have suffered discrimination from the same government for generations?

A Dominican taxi driver contends with Santo Domingo traffic. Immigration seemed to be on everyone's mind.

Hate on the radio waves

It's early morning, and we're on the road between Santiago and Puerto Plata. The drive is longer than an hour, and because we're tired, the small talk subsides and it's silent in the car.

Except for the radio.

Two hosts are talking about immigration. They are discussing a campaign by groups supporting Haitian immigrants to boycott Dominican exports to Haiti.

"The Haitians say they want to boycott Dominican products. So they will eat dirt, since you know the Haitians eat dirt," one host says.

The other host agrees: How are Haitians going to eat, since they don't produce anything? "They are ungrateful."

Dominican President Danilo Medina's restrictive immigration policies are good for the country, the hosts say, praising him for sticking to his guns.

One of the hosts suggests Haiti is trying to discredit the Dominican Republic in the eyes of the international community.

"I think this is the only country in the world where migrants aren't mistreated," he says. "Here, everyone is supportive."

We turn the dial and hear more of the same on another station.

Haitians "are unappreciative of this country," this host says.

Everything the international media has reported about the mistreatment of Haitians is wrong, he says.

"We are not the abusers of the Haitians; we are their saviors," he says.

The rhetoric is hateful and racist.

"(Haitians) lack hygiene, they're not sanitary," the host says.

We turn the radio off.

Men play dominoes on the sidewalk of Santo Domingo's Little Haiti neighborhood.

How the dominoes fall

Four men are playing dominoes on a sidewalk in the capital's Pequeño Haiti neighborhood, taking turns placing -- or slamming -- their game pieces on the specially made table.

This barrio may be called "Little Haiti," but three of the men don't hesitate to share their views of Haitians in the Dominican Republic.

"They are ungrateful, they're traitors," one of them says. Another refers to one of this country's darkest chapters, the 1937 massacre of thousands of Haitians by orders of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo.

"I, like Trujillo, would send them all to burn," the man says as he makes a double throat-slashing gesture.

All the while, one of the domino players is not speaking. He is younger and darker-skinned than the others. The same man who said he would burn Haitians nods toward the younger man and says, "We treat them better than anyone else."

The Haitian man says nothing, keeps his head down and plays the next domino.

The fear of violence

Ramona Ramirez runs a food kiosk in the Ortega neighborhood of Moca, a city just east of Santiago. Dominicans and Haitians lived in Ortega peacefully for years, she says.

Until a year ago.

That's when her relative, 18-year-old Carlos Jose Nuñez, was kidnapped and found dead two days later, his body tossed by a bridge.

Ramona Ramirez's relative was kidnapped and killed in Moca, sparking violence and international condemnation.

His face was swollen from an apparent beating. His legs were bound.

Witnesses told police that two Haitians who lived in the neighborhood had killed Nuñez, a Dominican who also lived in Ortega, according to local press reports.

When the news of the killing reached the neighborhood: "Oh my, if you saw a Haitian they would have stabbed him to pieces -- stabbed him to bits," Ramona says.

It just about came to that.

Dominican vigilantes armed with sticks and machetes assaulted their Haitian neighbors, shoving a woman to the ground as she screamed and grabbing a man with dreadlocks and cutting off some of his curls with a pocketknife. The mob broke into Haitians' homes, destroying belongings with baseball bats and hoes and removing personal items and setting them ablaze.

The incident, which came to symbolize the severity of the tensions between Dominicans and Haitians, was captured on video and shared widely by human rights groups.

After the attacks, all the Haitians in Ortega fled. The Diario Libre newspaper reported that some 300 Haitians left the neighborhood.

I met Ramona several months after the attacks, but it was immediately clear upon approaching Ortega that tensions had not subsided.

This house was among those raided in attacks on Haitians in Moca.

There were four of us in the car as we approached the neighborhood -- myself, a photographer, a Dominican driver and a Haitian guide.

Our guide rolled down his window and asked two Haitian workers for directions.

The Ortega neighborhood starts there, one of the workers said, pointing across the street. But you can't go there, he added, motioning at our Haitian guide.

No Haitians allowed, the worker said. If you enter, you risk getting attacked.

There was a tense moment inside the car.

Our guide insisted on going, suggesting the risk must be exaggerated. But our driver feared a possible attack, saying the risk was legitimate.

The workers persuaded our Haitian companion to stay with them and chat while the rest of us crossed the street.

Down an unpaved road, another local resident, Elpidio Nuñez, led us to one of the homes the vigilantes ransacked.

"We are good people here," he says. "When Haitians come, we give them a hand up."

It was a mixed neighborhood and everyone got along, he adds.

"Now, (Haitians) don't enter the neighborhood at all," he says. "Because of fear."

We stood at a barbed wire fence; on the other side was the house Elpidio was showing us. There was some junk out front, but it didn't seem abandoned. There was a radio playing inside and a motorcycle in the gravel driveway.

Elpidio asked us not to cross the fence and would not tell us who, if anybody, was living inside now that the Haitians were gone.

Wendy Osirus is among those who have organized campaigns to help immigrants gain legal status.

Fighting for himself and others

In Batey Baraguana, an impoverished sugar worker's village near Santiago, Wendy Osirus makes the rounds with the skill of a politician, asking about each resident's immigration status.

He congratulates those who gained legal status and patiently answers questions for the others.

"You have to organize yourselves," he tells them.

Wendy moved to the Dominican Republic from Haiti when he was 4. Now 29 and studying law, he created an organization to teach people how to apply for legal status and avoid scams.

The NGO he created is called the Ministry of Dominican-Haitian Orientation, or MONDHA by its Spanish acronym. His small team has helped restore citizenship or get legal work status for thousands of immigrants and Dominicans of Haitian descent.

"There are people who don't understand or comprehend the immigration plan," says Antoine Raphael, one of the organizers at MONDHA.

The government passed the new immigration laws, he says, but didn't create a campaign to explain how to benefit from them.

Given the history of racism in the country, Antoine says, it is hard not to consider that the laws were set up to fail the migrants.

"In my opinion, the government doesn't want to help the people," he says.

It was the economic and political uncertainty after a coup in Haiti that pushed Wendy's family to leave Cap-Haitien and move to the Dominican Republic in 1992.

Inside the offices of MONDHA, the organization created by Wendy Osirus to help immigrants in the Dominican Republic.

Growing up in Santiago, Wendy recalls other students in his public school feeling pity for him because of the unrest in Haiti.

That view changed after the devastating 2010 earthquake, which killed hundreds of thousands of Haitians and displaced more than a million others.

"The attitude toward Haitian migrants changed because their numbers multiplied, and so did their desperation," Wendy says.

As Haiti's sole neighbor, the Dominican Republic was forced to absorb some of the costs associated with the disaster, Wendy says.

In Santiago, Wendy showed me the remains of what was once a boarding house for Haitians.

Before the immigration crackdown -- before Dominican landlords were hesitant to rent to undocumented Haitians -- this building had maybe 10 small rooms divided by a narrow hallway. The rent for each room was about $23 a month, split among the four or five tenants who crammed into each room. All the tenants shared a single bathroom at the end of the hall. The building was gutted for a carpentry shop.

The landlord, Juan Mata, recalls at least four immigration raids on the property in the past few years. He hated how the immigration agents would knock down the doors to the boarding house each time.

"The Haitians who lived here were peaceful," he says. "They are hard workers."

The new immigration laws mean added scrutiny for Dominican landlords who rent to Haitians.

"I'm not racist. I treat Haitians just like Dominicans," Juan says, "But I follow the law. If they don't have documents, I can't rent them a room."

Gallery: Creating a home away from home

Photos:Creating a home away from home

Building a school in Jacmel, Haiti, isn't what David Palmer had in mind when he started teaching children across the border in the Dominican Republic five years earlier. Palmer, not pictured, studied in the Dominican Republic while in college and was struck by the children he saw living in poverty. The Bloomfield, Michigan, native returned and set up the Joan Rose Foundation to teach and provide meals for students. But he soon found himself and his school caught up in the country's immigration crisis.

Hide Caption

1 of 12

Photos:Creating a home away from home

Palmer, seen at left overseeing the Jacmel construction, named his foundation after his grandmother. When it opened in Esperanza in the Dominican Republic, it was about half-Dominican, half-Haitian. Over time, Dominicans withdrew -- partly, Palmer suspects, because the school was mixed. Many, he said, would rather see their children miss the one meal a day the school assured than be associated with "the Haitian school." Even the Haitian children adopted that worldview, he said: If they get in an argument, they're likely to call each other "maldito Haitiano" -- a "damn Haitian."

Hide Caption

2 of 12

Photos:Creating a home away from home

As the immigration controversy grew in the Dominican Republic, so did tensions around the school. Haitian immigrants felt threatened, as did their Dominican-born children, says Catherine Serrano, the foundation's director. Some were deported. With harassment interfering with their mission, and uncertain what consequences the crackdown could bring, she and Palmer made a decision: Close the school in Esperanza and move it to Haiti. Families who had come to depend on the foundation were invited to move, too.

Hide Caption

3 of 12

Photos:Creating a home away from home

"Jacmel has something going for it," said Palmer, who sports several tattoos. When CNN visited the construction site, some of the school's 16 planned houses were close to completion, with roofs being hoisted atop cinder-block walls. Nearby, other workers shoveled and pick-axed dirt where new foundations would be laid. Palmer recently said he made the right move. The school is up and running, the families who came from Esperanza now live in the new homes, and the foundation has started a microloan program.

Hide Caption

4 of 12

Photos:Creating a home away from home

Fathers of students went to Jacmel and joined locals building the new school. For some men, it was a homecoming; for others, a new beginning. "This is my first time working in Haiti," said Heriberto Martinez, born in Esperanza three decades ago. Wensly Dalembert, 23, says he feels like Haiti is his country even though he, too, was born across the border. "We lived a life of humiliation in the Dominican Republic being black and Haitian," he said, recalling being stopped at a checkpoint and showing a Dominican officer his Dominican birth certificate. "You are not Dominican, you are Haitian," he said the officer told him. "Even if we don't know how to speak Creole or don't know anything about Haiti, they refuse to recognize us and say we are Haitians and don't belong."

Hide Caption

5 of 12

Photos:Creating a home away from home

The Joan Rose Foundation was still operating in Esperanza when CNN visited last year. Here, two students are in the foundation's dining room. Virtually all of the foundation's students are Dominicans of Haitian descent; that is, children born in the Dominican Republic to immigrant parents. The school is where they come for education, food and sanctuary.

Hide Caption

6 of 12

Photos:Creating a home away from home

Outside, the Esperanza schoolyard was still alive with children shouting, running and kicking up dirt as they stomped around a rectangular dirt lot where they played baseball and other games.

Hide Caption

7 of 12

Photos:Creating a home away from home

A student shows off crawfish he found in a canal by the Esperanza school. Jacmel, on Haiti's southern coast, is very different from what the school's families know in Esperanza, a rich agricultural region where Haitian immigrants often work in the rice fields or on tobacco and banana plantations. Some 25 families -- about 170 people -- later moved to Jacmel, which many consider Haiti's cultural capital. It's a place of artists and beaches where tourism is the biggest draw.

Hide Caption

8 of 12

Photos:Creating a home away from home

Among those who moved is Yancy, whose three daughters -- one of whom is seen here -- attend the foundation's school. In Esperanza, Yancy showed her children's birth certificates, which state the girls were born in the Dominican Republic. Nonetheless, she says, they are considered foreigners. "They won't recognize (their) citizenship because I was born in Haiti," she said.

Hide Caption

9 of 12

Photos:Creating a home away from home

Yancy left the Haitian border city of Ouanaminthe looking for work in the Dominican Republic after her parents died 16 years ago. She ended up in Esperanza, seen here. "I didn't find the life I was hoping for," she said. For her, the foundation was a godsend: In addition to school for her children, it gave her a job through GoodThreads, which employs women to design and make needlepoint belts for export. Yancy quickly decided to move to Haiti with the foundation. "My daughters are getting older," she said, "and we don't have a future here."

Hide Caption

10 of 12

Photos:Creating a home away from home

Gladys also has a child at the foundation's school. She was born in the Dominican Republic, but like hundreds of thousands her citizenship was annulled because her parents were immigrants. The government passed a law for people like Gladys to reclaim her citizenship, but she'd rather move to Haiti than try to win back her rightful place in a country where she's never felt truly at home. "I was born here, but I'm undocumented," Gladys said in Esperanza. "I feel 100% Haitian."

Hide Caption

11 of 12

Photos:Creating a home away from home

Men from Esperanza head to the beach in Jacmel on their first day off from the construction site. There was a lot of laughter, singing, drinking -- and one epic rap battle in the sand. Wensly Dalembert recalled a similar beach trip four years ago in the Dominican Republic: He and his friends, all Dominicans of Haitian descent, were playing soccer when a group of Dominicans of Spanish descent told them to give up their spot. "You are not in your country, get out of here," he remembers one of the men saying. That won't happen in Jacmel. He feels at home here, but the cost of finding peace was self-exile from his country of birth.

Hide Caption

12 of 12

Juan calls himself apolitical, but based on what he knows, he says, the immigration measures sound fair.

"I'd like to live in New York, but if they catch me there without papers, they would return me here," Juan says.

On our way out, Wendy spots a group of about seven Haitian workers across the street. He walks over and asks whether they have submitted their paperwork to apply for legal status.

No, the men say.

Get your documents in order or risk deportation or raids on your homes, Wendy tells them.

The men don't want to hear about paperwork.

If my house is raided, one says, "I would kill an immigration officer."

The threat hangs in the air.

After a moment of silence, Wendy responds just as forcefully: "No violence. The only fight is the fight for legal status."

While Wendy has helped hundreds get their papers, he was still working on his own immigration status when I left.

He tracked down records from his elementary school and found seven Dominican witnesses who testified to his 24 years in the country, but he was still searching for some older bank records.

In the meantime, Wendy is in this country on a Haitian passport and tourist visa.

He must drive to the border every 30 days, cross into Haiti, then cross back to extend his visa for another month.

"Culturally, I feel (the Dominican Republic) is my country, but I also have some hesitance to embrace it because of the discrimination for simply being Haitian, which puts me in a place of emotional instability," he says.

"I don't know which country is mine."

A Dominican soldier stands guard near the Dominican-Haitian border.

Crossing the border

For many Haitian immigrants going home, the border crossing at Dajabon offers their last view of the Dominican Republic.

I wanted to follow their path, so we took a local bus, or guagua, to the border. It dropped us off in front of a green sign pointing toward the international boundary, and the town of Ouanaminthe just on the other side.

Twice a week, this crossing turns into a binational market where Dominicans and Haitians can mingle and buy and sell goods in what is essentially an open buffer zone.

It's a clattering, disorienting scene of people hawking goods, offering rides, asking questions -- a flow of humanity in all directions, all happening right at the border crossing, which continues to function.

Navigating customs isn't easy in a crowd where it is hard to tell government officials apart from everyone else.

The soldiers, though, are easy to spot. A Dominican in uniform stood next to us as we leaned against a wall to fill out the exit paperwork.

Being posted at the customs building, which provides a sliver of shade, is better than being stationed in the middle of the market, he says. I wasn't curious about why a soldier was standing at the customs office until I caught a glimpse of a legal pad in his hands.

"Voluntary deportations," it read.

The scene at the binational market on the border is chaotic.

Reliable numbers about how many Haitians have voluntarily left the Dominican Republic are hard to come by, but on this day I see evidence that an attempt is being made to keep count.

By the outset of 2016, the number had topped 113,000, according to the Dominican government.

The government said more than 288,000 undocumented immigrants had registered for the "regularization" plan by late last year, according to the International Organization for Migration. But it is unclear how many of these immigrants have completed the process and have their identity documents. A spreadsheet on the interior ministry's website dated September 2015 lists about 200,000 names of undocumented migrants who were yet to pick up their paperwork.

More detailed immigration statistics -- deportations, estimates of undocumented immigrants living in the country, the number of people affected by the immigration laws -- were never provided, despite repeated requests and government assurances.

Authorities pointed me to a speech Dominican President Medina made last year at a summit of Central American leaders in Guatemala, where he called the criticisms of the immigration policies a campaign to discredit his country.

"I understand that this is a complex reality, with various legal elements, diverse groups of the population and many statistics," Medina said. "It is possibly not a great media story, since it does not lend itself to big alarmist headlines, nor a prefabricated narrative of persecutors and the persecuted."

His bottom line: If the United States and European Union can regulate and enforce their immigration laws, why can't the Dominican Republic do the same?

Sister Marleny Gomez, left, says both governments are flirting with a potential crisis.

The view from Haiti

Across the border in Ouanaminthe, Sister Marleny Gomez helps new arrivals find their way back home.

Marleny, a Catholic nun from Colombia, has been based here for four years, at Our Lady of the Assumption Church and school.

"The voluntary deportees, the ones who are choosing to leave the Dominican Republic on their own, are the ones who have family here and who know where to stay," Marleny says.

The most needy are those who were deported.

"They've spent so many years in the Dominican Republic that when they arrive, they say they have some distant cousins or a grandmother somewhere," she says. "This is where the confusion arises, because they don't know how to get to those cities, they don't have money, they don't know where they are."

The flow of returnees and deportees has been manageable here, the nun says, but both governments are flirting with a potential crisis.

I crossed the border here thinking that a high-traffic crossing like this one might overwhelm the Haitian side. But I found Oauanaminthe to be functioning normally. (A crisis has indeed developed near the border, but not in the north. In Anse-a-pitre, in southeastern Haiti, tent cities sprung up as returnees flowed into unprepared municipalities.)

As we talk in her office, my gaze floats behind her to a painting on the wall.

It shows two boys -- one black, one white -- sitting together on a rock between two palm trees. Arms around each other, they're looking toward the ocean. Above them are two flags flying from the trees -- one Haitian, the other Dominican.

It's a vision of hope shared by many on both sides of the border, including those in Cap-Haitien, Haiti's major port city in the north.

That's where I found Jean sitting with several others on the steps of a shop.

Just a few weeks ago, Jean says, he came across a fellow countryman walking on the highway, having just returned from the Dominican Republic. The man didn't have money to buy a bus ticket to get to his hometown, so Jean helped him out.

"I want our countries to work together," he says. "There's no work here either."

We exchange good-byes, and I ask him for his last name.

"Kerry," he replies.

I jot it down in my notebook, and then pause after reading it aloud. "Jean Kerry?" My attempt to pronounce "Jean" as the French would say it -- something akin to "John" -- is the punchline.

Further down the street I run into Wilmar Innocent, a former mayor of Cap-Haitien, who was holding court with his supporters.

"The Haitians and Dominicans are two neighboring peoples on the same island," he says. "There are many problems, but we share one destiny."

He wants the international community to speak up and play a more direct role in bringing Haiti and the Dominican Republic closer together.

Every Haitian has a relative living in the Dominican Republic, he says. The two countries are too intertwined to try to segregate now.

"Politics tears the two countries apart," he says, "But we have to do everything we can to bring the two nations together, like the wings of a dove."

Mariano Castillo is a writer and editor for CNN Digital. Fernando Decillis is a photographer based in Atlanta. Mariano was awarded a fellowship to promote excellence in global news coverage through the International Center for Journalists, which funded the trip. CNN maintained editorial oversight of the story.